I don't dispute the heroic efforts by everyone who put their lives on the line, but the tragic fact is that the chernobyl reactor fire could have been avoided if there had been more attention paid to safer reactor design and materials.
Although the fire itself was caused by human error, the RBMK style reactors are much worse than the machines run by the US or western Europe and the powers that came up with that style of reactor are at least partly to blame for that tragedy.
The end isn't in sight yet, the "coffin" that is encasing the bad reactor is cracking, it may collapse causing another giant radioactive cloud of dust to blow all over the Ukraine, Russia, and Europe.
The thing is, that you don't have to be a "paranoid governmental conspiricy theorist" to now get spied upon or worse.
I went to Washington D.C. on some business, and I had shipped my suitcase via UPS to my hotel beforehand. Since I was only traveling with my laptop, a camera, and a single change of clothing in my backpack, I was searched and double searched for over an hour.
After taking one or two pictures of monuments and such, I went to a cafe where I spoke to someone who had been "picked up" by men in black suits off the street after taking pictures of some buildings he thought looked cool. It turns out one of them was a secret government facility of some sort. The FBI raided his apartment, and took EVERYTHING photo related, held him for 48 hours in jail before deciding he was harmless. When letting him go, they warned him to "be careful" because they "can do this anytime they want"
I cannot say that I feel very comfortable about some of the broad-based stuff that the patriot act allows governmental agencies, but this country does have a history of curtailing civil rights during a wartime footing.
The question still remains, is this really helping? and are we hurting more people than helping?
The cost of moving large amounts of data "off site" (like 3 TB or so) and the business requirements to keep stuff for many years to meet legal regulations and such make this a neccessity right now.
Hopefully, (not holding my breath) archive storage media with long term stability will come out in the density we need at the cost we can afford will arrive soon. Otherwise Tape is going to be around for a long time.
The thing is, scientists have started creating organisms (plants that is) to produce chemicals that are found in animals, or bacteria for defense. The difference between spraying bacteria onto a field to kill off insects and creating plants that manufacture the same toxin is that you are creating a strain of... corn lets say that is full of natural pesticide with every bite.
No offence intended, we just don't have long term studies in a controlled environment to see what that can do to animals or people who eat the finished product. Also, a GMO strain may interbreed with some wild strain releasing your Modified genetics to the wild. IF something bad is discovered later on, it would be too late.
There are many pests in the Continental US that were brought in for some research and "accidentaly" released and are running around wild. We now have the unprecedented possibility of creating a new "gypsy moth", "dandelion", "tiger mosquito", "killer bee" that is genetically strengthened to handle anything we can throw at it.
Having compressed air propel the firework during the launch phase of these "mortars" is pretty cool, it would actually increase reliability of the fireworks. Gunpowder is suceptible to changes in humidity, temperature, etc. and it doesn't always propel the basketball sized shell to the proper altitude. The new engineering problem will be to make sure the bursting charge is reliable with the compressed air cannon.
I would hate to see a fully loaded shell fall back down on the ground in the spectator area.
There are some serious implications to directly manipulating genes as opposed to just going through the natural breeding process.
Previously, people just grew and harvested stuff until it had the best of the properties that they wanted, now we are starting to get genes from other places and just kind of force the plant to make it. Until now, it wasn't possible to cross a fish or a spider and a plant that grows corn. This is the danger with trying GMO's as opposed to just planting the seeds of the tallest corn stalk and eating the rest of the corn until all the corn grew tall.
If possible make sure you have adequate ducted air, not just blown around through the drop-ceiling if you have one. On really hot days, the air conditioning in the building cannot cope with the amount of heat in the building, and the temperature slowly rises to a very uncomfortable level.
Being able to use a fully auto espresso machine and pushing a button for the coffee drink was a really nice thing. It took a lot of mess out of the coffee area and was handy for those late nights. The place I work at now just has the worst tasting coffee that I have ever encountered.
Most of exchange problems occur when you have an exchange server being the SMTP gateway. IF I were you, find a product to be the SMTP gateway that doesn't use anything made by Microsoft. There are also serious problems using the IIS SMTP service to talk to exchange. So, in short, get another kind of SMTP gateway to run the SMTP service, and then run Exchange behind it forwarding all mail to your non-microsoft gateway.
After building lots of RAID stuff on x86 based machines, I found that whatever RAID you pick for redundancy is probably going to be OK as long as it is more than RAID level 0, but recovery may vary.
I would opt for a OS independent solution, where adding new drives doesn't cause you to have to back the whole thing up, and re-initialize the array. Also, it stinks if there are a lot of annoying steps to go through to change a failed drive (reboots etc).
I do think that BioDiesel in general is a definate possibility to some of the energy problems of this country if you consider a few points:
1. most public transit already is on a diesel infrastructure.
2. many parts of our arable farmland in the Continental US is NOT growing anything because there is a glut of stuff like feed-corn, soybeans, and other oil producing plants.
3. lots of vegetable crop farmers here in the US are in the poor house.
4. if you look at a previous slashdot article, ethanol aka ethyl alchohol from cellulose is now a possiblity. (neccessary ingredient for making biodiesel) so you can use the whole plant not just the seed in growing fuel.
5. A significant amount of residential home heating here in the Northeast runs on home heating oil which is close enough to diesel, that I don't think the furnace will care
Honestly, I wouldn't mind that SOME of the money going to power our economy would go back to our farmers here in the US.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't dispute the heroic efforts by everyone who put their lives on the line, but the tragic fact is that the chernobyl reactor fire could have been avoided if there had been more attention paid to safer reactor design and materials.
Although the fire itself was caused by human error, the RBMK style reactors are much worse than the machines run by the US or western Europe and the powers that came up with that style of reactor are at least partly to blame for that tragedy.
The end isn't in sight yet, the "coffin" that is encasing the bad reactor is cracking, it may collapse causing another giant radioactive cloud of dust to blow all over the Ukraine, Russia, and Europe.
The thing is, that you don't have to be a "paranoid governmental conspiricy theorist" to now get spied upon or worse.
I went to Washington D.C. on some business, and I had shipped my suitcase via UPS to my hotel beforehand. Since I was only traveling with my laptop, a camera, and a single change of clothing in my backpack, I was searched and double searched for over an hour.
After taking one or two pictures of monuments and such, I went to a cafe where I spoke to someone who had been "picked up" by men in black suits off the street after taking pictures of some buildings he thought looked cool. It turns out one of them was a secret government facility of some sort. The FBI raided his apartment, and took EVERYTHING photo related, held him for 48 hours in jail before deciding he was harmless. When letting him go, they warned him to "be careful" because they "can do this anytime they want"
I cannot say that I feel very comfortable about some of the broad-based stuff that the patriot act allows governmental agencies, but this country does have a history of curtailing civil rights during a wartime footing.
The question still remains, is this really helping? and are we hurting more people than helping?
The cost of moving large amounts of data "off site" (like 3 TB or so) and the business requirements to keep stuff for many years to meet legal regulations and such make this a neccessity right now. Hopefully, (not holding my breath) archive storage media with long term stability will come out in the density we need at the cost we can afford will arrive soon. Otherwise Tape is going to be around for a long time.
Well,
... corn lets say that is full of natural pesticide with every bite.
The thing is, scientists have started creating organisms (plants that is) to produce chemicals that are found in animals, or bacteria for defense. The difference between spraying bacteria onto a field to kill off insects and creating plants that manufacture the same toxin is that you are creating a strain of
No offence intended, we just don't have long term studies in a controlled environment to see what that can do to animals or people who eat the finished product. Also, a GMO strain may interbreed with some wild strain releasing your Modified genetics to the wild. IF something bad is discovered later on, it would be too late.
There are many pests in the Continental US that were brought in for some research and "accidentaly" released and are running around wild. We now have the unprecedented possibility of creating a new "gypsy moth", "dandelion", "tiger mosquito", "killer bee" that is genetically strengthened to handle anything we can throw at it.
Having compressed air propel the firework during the launch phase of these "mortars" is pretty cool, it would actually increase reliability of the fireworks. Gunpowder is suceptible to changes in humidity, temperature, etc. and it doesn't always propel the basketball sized shell to the proper altitude. The new engineering problem will be to make sure the bursting charge is reliable with the compressed air cannon.
I would hate to see a fully loaded shell fall back down on the ground in the spectator area.
There are some serious implications to directly manipulating genes as opposed to just going through the natural breeding process. Previously, people just grew and harvested stuff until it had the best of the properties that they wanted, now we are starting to get genes from other places and just kind of force the plant to make it. Until now, it wasn't possible to cross a fish or a spider and a plant that grows corn. This is the danger with trying GMO's as opposed to just planting the seeds of the tallest corn stalk and eating the rest of the corn until all the corn grew tall.
If possible make sure you have adequate ducted air, not just blown around through the drop-ceiling if you have one. On really hot days, the air conditioning in the building cannot cope with the amount of heat in the building, and the temperature slowly rises to a very uncomfortable level. Being able to use a fully auto espresso machine and pushing a button for the coffee drink was a really nice thing. It took a lot of mess out of the coffee area and was handy for those late nights. The place I work at now just has the worst tasting coffee that I have ever encountered.
Most of exchange problems occur when you have an exchange server being the SMTP gateway. IF I were you, find a product to be the SMTP gateway that doesn't use anything made by Microsoft. There are also serious problems using the IIS SMTP service to talk to exchange. So, in short, get another kind of SMTP gateway to run the SMTP service, and then run Exchange behind it forwarding all mail to your non-microsoft gateway.
As different systems evolve, maybe we will see more devices hit the civilian market and prices drop, which could mean a win-win for all consumers.
After building lots of RAID stuff on x86 based machines, I found that whatever RAID you pick for redundancy is probably going to be OK as long as it is more than RAID level 0, but recovery may vary. I would opt for a OS independent solution, where adding new drives doesn't cause you to have to back the whole thing up, and re-initialize the array. Also, it stinks if there are a lot of annoying steps to go through to change a failed drive (reboots etc).
I do think that BioDiesel in general is a definate possibility to some of the energy problems of this country if you consider a few points:
1. most public transit already is on a diesel infrastructure.
2. many parts of our arable farmland in the Continental US is NOT growing anything because there is a glut of stuff like feed-corn, soybeans, and other oil producing plants.
3. lots of vegetable crop farmers here in the US are in the poor house.
4. if you look at a previous slashdot article, ethanol aka ethyl alchohol from cellulose is now a possiblity. (neccessary ingredient for making biodiesel) so you can use the whole plant not just the seed in growing fuel.
5. A significant amount of residential home heating here in the Northeast runs on home heating oil which is close enough to diesel, that I don't think the furnace will care
Honestly, I wouldn't mind that SOME of the money going to power our economy would go back to our farmers here in the US.